Tag Archives: home

I recently made reference to the fact that I spent a weekend working at a friend’s house in early October. This largely involved sanding the wooden floors in two rooms and attending to the near-disastrous state of alcove shelving in the living room (some people should be banned from owning hand saws).

Let’s start by looking at the big job: sanding. Lots of sanding. Then again, downstairs.

Some of you may remember how, earlier this year – before the summer that appears to have come and gone so quickly – I erected a fairly straightforward freestanding, temporary fence to keep my mum’s puppy from wondering off along the shared driveway.

Inevitably, I was asked to do the same again alongside the garden to the rear of the property. This is a job I actually completed in July and, as I sit down to write about it now, I’d like to indicate that I had to make a couple of slight alterations for the same idea to function in its situation.

Living in flat with minimal household facilities, I found myself wanting – and, almost of necessity, needing – to use the top surface of my small fridge/freezer as a horizontal surface to hold and store items.

One problem I’ve always been faced with is that, in being a cold surface, it is the ideal place for warm water to settle and form droplets (even small puddles) as it cools. But, I recently came up with a very simple solution to counteract this and it didn’t involve making mounds of mess.

Over the weekend, I made my most recent trip to Ikea (twenty-four hours after ‘Black Friday’, no less) and obtained a final box of Lots mirror tiles (plus one spare pack, in case of any further breakages).

This post will tie up all the loose ends with regards to how the project came to a close.

At the time of writing this; my landlord has already agreed to replace the rotting timber windows that adorn my ground-floor property. Single-glazing doesn’t help to provide the most comfortable of winter-time temperatures and with the temperatures having plummeted to as low as freezing (and below) in recent weeks; I decided to take a chance upon trying an inexpensive secondary glazing film kit
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Here in the UK, we’re supposedly in the midst of an extra-cold spell that’s likely to last the next two-weeks. Waking up to scrape a light frosting from my car windscreen each day… This only feels like what winters were like only a few years ago, before they started to emerge almost mild, by comparison.

I recently wrote about my preference for the addition of halogen heaters in my home and, on Saturday, I added a second to my growing collection. A day earlier in Lidl, I spotted something else that could help to brighten up my kitchen…

Almost every night at this time of the year, my single-glazed windows invite the warm-air molecules to stay awhile as the temperature outside begins to plummet. In short, this leads to condensation.

With wooden windows (particularly those of which are neglected from regular maintenance), condensation can lead to a case of wet rot as this water runs down the glass and is absorbed by the horizontal surfaces. Regular maintenance (painting, putty, etc.) can prevent this but it won’t stop the condensation from forming.